Most of our living is at the level of our solar plexus. This level of living coincides with our senses: seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and tasting. The trouble with our senses is that they are not reliable. For example, it is dusk and you are walking, your eyes see something coiled, your senses say it is a snake. However, the truth is, it is a coiled hose. Its not that all our senses deceive us, they do however, lack the consciousness to discern fully, and at the same time you might say there is a quality of ignorance about them. Our senses do however, provide us with the capacity to maneuver effectively about our lower levels of our lives, that is "the getting and spending" part, but at the same time, negatively disassociates us with Nature.
The Buddhist keep the relationship between the, lower material aspects of our lives, and the spiritual part, by simply dividing the outcome of living a material based life, against the higher spiritual. The basic difference is that a strict material, "getting and spending" lived life, brings suffering, while the spiritual lived life brings happiness. Most people, if asked which they would prefer, would chose happiness. However, our "getting and spending" way of life has been praised, culturally excepted, and built into the perceived best practice of life to emulate. It has been praised so positively, that it has become a compulsion, to the point that we cannot control it, it controls us. Compulsion is cyclical, and loops us, so that the more we use it the stronger it becomes, and the more difficult it becomes to brake free.
The spiritual aspect of our lives is always with us, but becomes veiled and restricted by the "getting and spending" of the material side of us, causing us to live on the lower levels of life, while grooming us for even greater down word slides. The result is a blocking of our hearts, and the unensouling of our self. This disconnect, is our own making, and the finger of responsibility points directly at us.
What we forgot to install in our life is that we have an innate capacity for self-determination. Viktor E. Frankl, an immanent psychiatrist, and survivor of Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, says, "...Man is not fully conditioned and determined, but rather determines himself whether he gives into conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determined. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment."
Let us extend self-determination to include the determinate effect of the immediate Universe. This link to the Universe my seem surreal to the solar plexuses level we are accustom to be living at, but you may be surprised to find, we are in fact: born of the moon, children of the sun, off spring of the stars, and inheritors of the cosmic spaces...we and the universe are in essence not twain but one. Truly, we all are wondrously fashioned by the elements of the Universe: earth, water, wind, fire, akash or some say ether.
Our inherit connection to the Universe is not haphazard, we are it's inheritors, it's children, in all aspects of our commingled lives. We are looked after with the greatest of love and compassion, just as our earth parents looks after us. Because we live at a lower, evolutionary level then the harbingers of the celestial realms, our habits of life are not as virtuous and solidified as are the celestial beings. However, with self-determination and relentless application in following the right thing to do, we will rise higher, and higher, to take our place with the celestial divinities in their cosmic labor.
One truth, many paths. Be good, do good.
Louis DiVirgilio
